Business and tech leaders are being hurled head-first into a reimagined way of building and running applications.
The cloud is no longer just a peripheral “part” of the strategy or a half-baked afterthought. It’s becoming the backbone for businesses that want to offer differentiated value to their customers and prepare themselves for agility, scale, and sustainability.
We’re talking about cloud native and how it is fusing tech ecosystems and business strategy into brand-new, deeply integrated organisms.
Cloud native is cloud-first and cloud-forward
We are moving to a democratisation of code, of computing, and of cloud.
According to Gartner, “by 2025 … over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is proving to be a mover and shaker in this emerging cloud native era.
AWS has strategically positioned itself as a partner and co-creator with tech consultancies—including Devoteam—and open source technologies and communities around the world.
It’s becoming clearer than ever: the fastest way to move forward is together.
Exciting new AWS tools and services
AWS has released a whole stack of new tools and services in the last 4 years, and we cover them in our 2023 TechRadar. We are also excited that AWS has prioritised not just interface usability and accessibility but also security and compliance requirements—with its unprecedented “provable security” features.
Here are just three examples where AWS is meeting fast-changing needs in the market:
AWS QLDB
In 2019, AWS released its Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB). It combines all the desirable blockchain features—such as a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable log—but in the form of a centralised database, which is essential for compliance requirements.
AWS Application Composer
Just last year (2022), AWS launched Application Composer, a visual drag-and-drop tool you can use to build applications that use multiple AWS services. It reflects AWS’s commitment to meeting the evolving needs of DevOps teams.
AWS EventBridge
AWS EventBridge is a serverless, fully managed bus that lets you build event-driven applications at scale. You can use it in conjunction with popular SaaS products outside of AWS, as well as custom applications. EventBridge was released in 2019 and is, in our view, highly reliable and enterprise-ready.
But AWS does more than just develop its own tools. It has fuelled and invested in the open-source community.
Open source—stronger together and shoulder-to-shoulder
Instead of a top-down model where the provider governs over the customer with a tight fist, AWS has positioned itself as a supportive equal. AWS openly stands shoulder to shoulder with the developer community, and even more importantly, with their customers.
An integral part of this community of co-creation, of co-innovation, is the open source world.
David Nalley, head of open source strategy and marketing at AWS, wrote a piece on February 13, 2023, all about why AWS supports sustainable open source. He discusses the guiding principle of sustainability—and how he sees “healthy code and healthy communities” driving that sustainability. “By investing in open source, we are helping to ensure that the projects … remain secure and reliable for the long term,” he says.
Nalley also acknowledges how important open source is to AWS. “AWS would not be what it is today without open source. … We believe that open source produces better software faster, and we are proud to participate.” Last, but not least, Nalley affirms customers’ reliance on open source to run their workloads. “The innovation doesn’t have to come from AWS, either. Sometimes the best idea comes from one of our customers, and we work with them to make those improvements.”
On their website, AWS makes a bold but backable claim: “No company has done more to make open source accessible to the widest possible audience.”
In other words, we need one another. The open-source community has embraced making AWS better, and AWS has embraced making the open-source community better. And yes, together we can use technology to make not just business—but the world—better. AWS says on their website, “We are committed to bringing the value of open source to our customers, and the operational excellence of AWS to open source communities.”
It only makes sense, then, that the AWS ecosystem has exploded with open-source tools and partnerships over the past several years.
Pulumi
Pulumi is a popular infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool. Developers use it to create, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructures. You can use any of your favourite languages, and you can use it to create and manage resources on any cloud platform, including AWS.
Lacework
Lacework, a data-driven cloud-native application protection platform, is a great companion to your AWS cloud resources. With a single platform, you can catalogue your AWS cloud assets, gain visibility over emerging cloud security gaps, monitor activity with behavioural analytics, and stay on top of security compliance requirements.
Trivy
Another great open-source cloud security companion is Trivy, maintained by Aqua Security. It’s a scanning tool loved by DevOps teams to check for misconfigurations in cloud-native infrastructures and application stacks and deserves consideration in your AWS environment.
Wazuh
While we’re on the topic of security, Wazuh is another open-source tool that works well as part of your cloud security stack. It is a security information and event management (SIEM) solution. It comes with an AWS module so you can monitor AWS-based services and analyse infrastructure log data.
Prowler
Security compliance is becoming more complex, and now there are tools that help you cover all your bases in cloud. Prowler was developed to work best with AWS services. It makes assessments and audits easy against more than 240 controls and security frameworks easier than ever before.
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